Roitfeld achieved notoriety as editor of French Vogue, where she was accused of promoting 'porno chic', anorexia and racism. Now she's launched a magazine of her own

---------------------------------------
Carine Roitfeld began wearing high heels in order to look Mario Testino in the eye. Long before she became editor of French Vogue, Roitfeld was a young stylist working with Testino, then a little-known photographer.

"Mario has a very strong idea of how a woman should look, how she should stand, how the photo should be," Roitfeld says. "But I have a lot of ideas as well. So I had to get him to listen to me. It was difficult. Well, you know Mario is very tall. So I realised I needed to be looking him in the eye when we were shooting." Before that, she had usually worn flat shoes – for a stylist, a fashion shoot is a long working day spent mostly standing – but she swapped them for high heels. "And it worked. He has good ideas, but I have good ideas too." The stilettos were a smart move. The early advertising campaigns the pair shot, for Tom Ford's Gucci, went on to define fashion's aesthetic for the best part of a decade.

Interesting that Roitfeld, a controversial figure whose erotica-tinted aesthetic has been criticised as fuelling the sexualisation of fashion imagery, should use a stiletto on a fashion shoot not for sex appeal, but to square up to a male ego. Underestimate her at your peril. At 57 years old and after three decades in fashion, 20 months clear of a decade-long tenure at French Vogue, she is a rock star of the fashion front row. At New York fashion week this week, the launch party for CR Fashion Book, the biannual magazine that marks Roitfeld's return to the editor's chair, was the invitation everyone wanted. On an evening that saw a tornado hit Queens, and Manhattan buffeted and drenched by wind and rain from the storm's coat-tails, every hot model in town showed up to the Frick Collection in black tie to pay homage to Roitfeld, who held court in bandage-tight, floor-length black Alaïa.

Our interview is originally scheduled for the day after the party, but Roitfeld's new baby granddaughter, three-month old Romy, turns out to be in town and at the party, Roitfeld asks if I mind moving our slot. ("I must see her, I am sure you understand, no?") Two days later, we meet at the Standard East, a fancy new downtown hotel that has loaned Roitfeld rooms on the 18th floor to use as offices. She is wearing her signature pencil skirt, today by Balenciaga, along with a fitted black sweater (Alaïa) and towering apple-green platform sandals (Balenciaga). In person, she is surprisingly sweet, much more approachable than her public image suggests, with richly Parisian-flecked English that is as expressive as it is grammatically flawed.

I ask how she enjoyed the party. "I thought it was a great party, all the very beautiful people were there. But I had so many people to talk to. And I think maybe I drank a lot. Every time I am in a picture, someone takes my vodka glass away, because you don't want to hold a drink in a photograph. And every time the glass comes back, it is full. So I don't know how many vodkas, you see." At most such launches in NYC, the host nurses a Pellegrino.

But then, nobody ever accused Roitfeld of being vanilla. Scandal is what she does. Her French Vogue was notorious for an aesthetic that was dubbed "porno chic": nudity, bondage, blood. Karen Elson was tied up with a curtain cord. Sometimes it seemed there were more pictures in hotel bedrooms than fashion studios, more nipples than dresses. She was accused of promoting anorexia by printing semi-nude photos of very thin models, and of racism when the blond Dutch model Lara Stone appeared in the magazine painted black. One of her final issues, guest edited by Tom Ford, featured a 10-year-old model in full makeup posing on a tiger skin. Shortly after that photo was published to a media furore, Roitfeld and Condé Nast went their separate ways.

So when it was announced that Roitfeld was launching an independent magazine, with no prissy publishing house to worry about, the industry held its breath for the most outrageous magazine yet. As it turns out, the first issue of CR Fashion Book is a shock, but not in a way anyone predicted. Double-sided, the magazine has two covers. One shows Kate Upton, the voluptuous blond Sports Illustrated covergirl who resembles a young Monroe, holding a clutch of baby ducklings to her creamy bosom. The other shows a young girl wearing bunny ears, grinning from ear to ear while holding a plumply naked baby. Shot by Bruce Weber, the images radiate wholesomeness.

It is like a family picture, no? … the CR Fashion Book cover.
"No one is expecting this, huh?" Roitfeld smiles. "They expect me to have a very sexy girl on the cover, Kate Moss, or Lara Stone, legs, very sexy, lots of black around the eyes. But when I started to plan this magazine, I had just found out my daughter was pregnant. I started seeing babies everywhere, because I was thinking all the time about babies. I am so happy to be a grandmother, and it is amazing to be around a baby again. Babies are a mind-opener. They make you see the world in a whole new way. I had forgotten all this, because it is a long time since my children [she has a grown-up son, Vladimir, as well as her daughter] were small." Her favourite image in the magazine is the cover shot of the girl holding the baby. "The baby had just peed on her at that moment, and the girl was laughing, and her face was just so full of joy. It is like a family picture, no? Every family would love to have that picture on their chimney."

Inside, there are more dimply naked babies and puppies and more pregnant women, including a portrait of daughter Julia taken while pregnant with Romy. There is a model in Givenchy haute couture pushing a pram, and another in black-lace Gucci carrying a baby doll. There are more headshots, and fewer nude shots, than in Roitfeld's Vogue. The running theme is "Rebirth". There is still eroticism and provocation – Ford has written and photographed a "fairytale" about a Princess of New York ("when she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was gorgeous"), which includes a woman lying motionless in a glass casket, wearing a damson Dior suit and getting a pedicure. But the overall mood is upbeat, celebratory, and revolves around family. "I wanted to do something different. When I did my book last year [Irreverent, a kind of visual autobiography], I was a little shocked because I did not realise I used so much blood, so many knives. The book was like going to a shrink. I am ready to do something new now. I have always had a different side to me, a very family side.

"I am a mum, and now I am a grandma, and I have been with the same man for ever (her partner is Christian Restoin)." What's more, she says, it's not just her who is obsessed with babies. "When I was young, no one got married. Now, all the young people, they want to get married, they want security. Now that my children's friends are getting married, I go to more weddings than I ever did when I was young."

What Roitfeld has, which makes her bankable even in the dicey world of magazines, is a point of view everyone wants to hear. It is worth noting that her magazine is biannual, like the catwalk show season, launched concurrently with the catwalk shows, and – in contrast to any other fashion magazine – does not take its cue from the mood of the current season's clothes. (This autumn's clothes are rather dark and gothic, a world away from ducklings and bunny ears.) The format places her as an opinion-former alongside the designers, looking ahead to future seasons, rather than in line with traditional magazines, selling clothes currently in store. Oh, and the next issue, she says, will be completely different. "You will be very surprised, I promise," she teases.

"Carine is a born performer, and magazines are her stage," says Stephen Gan, Roitfeld's business partner and longtime collaborator. Roitfeld and Gan, who is the editor-in-chief of V and creative director of Harper's Bazaar magazines, hatched the idea for CR Fashion Book in New York, early this year. The double-sided, wordless cover was conceived because the magazine, which sells for $15 (£9.30), "should be like a coffee-table book. When you get bored of one picture, you can turn it over," says Roitfeld. Features printed in other languages, such as Chinese (then translated on the following spread) are another innovation "because the printed languages look so beautiful, and because I think international readers will be happy to see something in their language".

Advertising is placed alphabetically, with Alexander McQueen at the front and Valentino at the back. Did she have trouble convincing the advertisers to go along with it? "No one had a problem with it!" says Roitfeld triumphantly. Certainly, the 340-page issue is fat, with 140 ads (outpacing the original plan for 100) sold at $40,000 per double-page spread. CR Fashion Book will also have a life online. The traditional front-of-book, newsy section will live only on the website, alongside pictures and diary entries posted by Roitfeld. "I am from the age of magazines," she says, "so the internet is terrifying to me. But I am learning."

In Roitfeld's account, most of the scandal that has swirled around her career is a fuss about nothing. She flatly denies she was fired from Vogue – and indeed, the last time I interviewed her, when she had been editor for eight years, she said she thought 10 years would be about the right length of time in the job. On the subject of controversy, she says she is "against taboos", but that she never printed an image she wouldn't want her children to see. She doesn't use cigarettes in her photographs. She dismisses as "ridiculous" the allegation of racism, saying her French edition featured many more black models than most European or American Vogues. "For me, a model is never just a model. She is an actress. We are telling a story, and she is playing her part. I get on well with models and I like to treat them well." She rejects the moniker of "porno chic", preferring "erotic chic". The little girls in the Tom Ford shoot were not in any way exposed, she says: they wore T-shirts under their evening gowns. "But people will see what they want to see."

Nor will she acknowledge any rivalry with Anna Wintour, however much the fashion industry may stir. "Anna was my boss for a long time. I respect her. We worked fine together. She's tough, but she's honest. And when my kids moved to New York, she was one of the first people who invited them to dinner. As a mum, I don't forget that."

Leaving the cushioned world of Vogue was, she says, a shock. "Before, I had an assistant, a car, everything organised for me. Now I have to call taxis on the street. Vogue was like a golden cage. It is a beautiful life, but for me, it is better to have a change. I feel I am making a new family. It is a wonderful new energy."

Roitfeld is in a good mood. "I'm happy because I didn't know how it would be, to be at fashion shows, and not be the editor of Vogue. I did not know where they would sit me. You know what the fashion world can be like ... and now I am happy and surprised, because I know I have many friends." Zipping around New York in yellow taxis, she finds, is fine. She tells me that she has taken up ballet classes in recent years, and stands to show me the extra strips of fabric her dressmaker has inserted in her pencil skirt, because "still I am skinny, but now my bottom is more round. It's good, no? I don't want to do Botox, that kind of thing. But I think how you hold yourself is very important. Ballet is good, because it makes you stand up tall."

Those glasses are the least of my concerns....
That last outfit is just not flattering on her legs, tummy, chest....
The skirt should be longer, to cover her knees, at least. The fabric of the top is too clingy, and even if she has a great body, that does her no favor at all.
God knows she looks great for her age, but sometimes she just goes a tad too far. Her ....erm...chest area is just embarrasing. We see too much of some stuff it shouldn´t be showing.
Carine you´re the queen of everything, just tone it down a notch.

Somehow I quite like that the dress isn't flattering at the stomach. That part of the body tends to grow bigger with age and Carine is only human after all. Also, women don't wear padded bras in France.